When Mara Prentiss received tenure earlier this year, she doubled the number of female senior faculty in the Physics Department.
But as more women are tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), tenures like Prentiss's may not be considered unusual.
Of the 20 professors to receive tenure in the FAS during the last academic year, a record six were women.
And administrators have indicated that Harvard is beginning an attempt to increase the number of women in the senior faculty.
"Harvard is working very hard and showing good results," Joseph J. McCarthy, assistant dean for academic planning in the FAS, said earlier this semester. "Are we where we want to be! No. Are we moving in the right direction? Yes."
But many critics say Harvard is not moving fast enough or far enough.
Earlier this semester, a group of Radcliffe alumnae announced they would boycott the University's $2.1 billion capital campaign, citing the dismal number of women on the faculty.
And during Commencement last year, the Radcliffe Class of 1960 voted to withhold its annual gift from Harvard because of a lack of tenured women in the faculty.
"I'd like to see them do something now--not 10 years from now, not at the millennium, now--to improve the rate of women being tenured to the rate of women earning Ph.D.'s," Joan Bolker '60 told The Crimson earlier this semester.
Obstacles
But administrators say the goal of tenuring women at the rate they earn Ph.D.'s is impossible because Harvard tenures only those at the top of their field, not those coming out of graduate school.
The candidate pool of women at the top of their fields is heavily recruited by other schools, administrators say. And tenuring women at higher rates is also difficult because Harvard's turnover rate of less than five percent a year means few slots are open.
"We are always looking for the leading person so you might say we are more risk-averse than some institutions," says Carol J. Thompson, associate dean for academic affairs in the FAS. "Maybe one of the reasons we are very cautious is that our faculty generally spend 35 years here."
McCarthy acknowledges that Harvard has a historically bad record of hiring women, but he says Harvard does not lag behind other major research universities.
But statistics show that while Harvard does not lag far behind, it is hardly leading the pack.
Approximately 11 percent (43 of 406) of the College's full professors are women, a number that places Harvard ahead of Yale and the University of Michigan. But Brown, Columbia, Princeton and Stanford all have better records, although only by a percentage point or two.
Junior Faculty
Harvard does better on the associate professor level, with 34 percent (24 of 71) being women.
While Brown's 42 percent far outpaces Harvard's numbers, Harvard has more female associate professors than do a number of other universities. Female associate professors at Columbia and Stanford hover around 28 percent, Princeton has 30 percent and Yale and the University of Michigan are a point below Harvard, at 33 percent.
However, the progress Harvard has made on the associate professor level is not sustained on the assistant professor level.
Harvard's level of female assistant professors is just 30 percent. Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Yale all top Harvard, some by as much as eight percentage points.
Critics charge that if Harvard was utilizing the Ph.D. pool, as Bolker argues it should, the number of assistant professors would be higher because of the larger pool of female candidates coming out of graduate schools today.
Searching for Women
The tenure process currently has several steps to insure qualified women candidates are considered, according to Marjorie Garber, associate dean for affirmative action. At the beginning of the tenure process, a department must turn in a short list of the candidates being considered.
Departments then request letters about can didates from those in their field. The respondents are asked if there are any candidates of significant caliber who have not been included on the short list.
"We do...ask that [departments] address the question of women and minorities," McCarthy says. "If there were no women or minorities on the short list, why not? If there was a woman and/or a minority on the short list and he or she was not the candidate, in what way does he or she compare with the candidate who was put forward?"
"This is something that is critical," he adds.
In addition, McCarthy says Garber works with departments that are compiling lists of candidates and helps to ensure qualified women and minorities are considered for the job.
The College has instituted a number of policies calculated to help working parents and make it possible for more women to become professors and develop their own research, McCarthy says.
"The parental leave policy and the parental extensions of contracts has helped and it certainly has sent a message that Harvard and the FAS are more welcoming to women or to junior faculty who want to have a career and a family," McCarthy says.
Administrators say family concerns are the most common reasons for a candidate not to accept tenure at Harvard.
In addition. Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles has relaxed the clock for junior faculty to allow them to take more time off and spend more time on their research, McCarthy says.
"Dean [Knowles] has made more flexible the leave policy for junior faculty and has provided some funds for supplementing outside research money so [junior faculty] can take more leaves [to] work on their research," McCarthy says.
Although administrators say that Harvard is helping women with the junior faculty policy changes, some say the policy will have little effect on the number of female full professors because so few junior faculty receive tenure...
"It's ridiculous," Bolker says. "What Harvard has done for women has been to support junior faculty, but it's extremely rare for anyone to be promoted to tenure from within the University."
On average, 10 to 15 percent of the appointments in any year go to people currently teaching at Harvard, according to McCarthy.
"Harvard is not a tenure-track institution." Garber says, echoing the words of many administrators.
Looking Ahead
Despite the boycott of the capital campaign and the general anger of Radcliffe alumnae at the slow process, administrators say it is unlikely the coming years will see any dramatic upswing in the tenuring of women.
While last year's record-setting six appointments bode well for the future, President Neil L. Rudenstine says the process of increasing the percentage of senior professors who are women will be a slow one. Assuming that 20 positions opened this year and all were given to women, only 16 percent of Harvard's tenured faculty would be women.
"I think it's very hard for people outside an institution to understand what the realistic pace of changing the composition of a tenured faculty is," Rudenstine said this summer.
Even if the University tenured only women, "it would still look like slow motion to someone outside of the institution," the president says.
Read more in News
Police In Dark About New Windshield Law
